anywhere i go (i carry your heart)
by radialarch
Summary: Bucky's heart is big enough for the both of them. / Steve/Bucky, magical realism.
1. Chapter 1

**Title**: anywhere i go (i carry your heart)  
**Pairing**: Steve/Bucky  
**Rating**: T  
**Warnings**: mentions of canon-typical violence  
**Spoilers**: loosely for CA:TFA.  
**Wordcount**: 2264  
**Summary**: Bucky's heart is big enough for the both of them.

**A/N**: The concept & spirit of this fic are taken directly from the fic "anywhere i go, you go" by falling-voices, who is brilliant and lovely.

* * *

Steve's heart has always been weak, stuttering — the red in his chest is one of Bucky's earliest memories, flickering as if it might go out at any moment. And people could live without a heart, but Bucky was sure, surer than he was of himself, that Steve couldn't — that the light slanting through Steve's ribcage might be faint and small, but his heart was the biggest thing about him.

—

Steve picked fights he couldn't win and refused to lose them, spitting out blood and gravel from between his teeth and staggering back to his feet with his fists held up. So Bucky learned how to hold himself bigger and throw his punches harder; how to keep his feet when it was two-on-one, three-on-one, how to get between a snarl and Steve's all-too-fragile body.

There's one thing he never did learn, through all his years of following Steve: Steve's heart always beat the steadiest during a fight, like he was doing something certain and true, while Bucky could never stop his from rattling against his ribs with worry.

—

It was a cold, hard winter, when Steve hadn't really stopped coughing for four straight months, but this time he was curled on the floor gasping for air in high, tight wheezes and the light in his chest was duller than it'd ever been. Bucky wrestled him into sitting up, put an arm around Steve's shoulders and thumped his bony back, feeling utterly helpless.

"C'mon, Steve," he muttered, not even sure what he was trying to say. "Stay with me, pal, you can do this."

But Steve had a pained smile on his lips when he whispered, "Sorry, Buck," and Bucky could feel Steve's heart skipping under his hand, its beats irregular and fading; and it wasn't _fair_, when Bucky's was strong and steady in his own chest — when Bucky's was useless to him, because he didn't love like Steve loved, wide and expansive —

"Don't you dare," Bucky croaked. He settled a hand on his chest, and pressed, and _pressed_, until he felt his heart fluttering against his palm, and it didn't falter as he wrapped his fingers around it and pulled; as he laid it urgently against Steve's thin chest, mouthing _please_ like a prayer—

And his heart was glowing red as it sank into Steve's ribcage, sinking seamlessly into the shell of Steve's heart as if it'd always belonged there, and Steve was still coughing but the color was coming back into his face.

"You shouldn't have done that," Steve finally croaked out in between coughs, "Bucky, your _heart_—"

And maybe there was a hollowness in Bucky's chest that was more than just the space of something missing, but he put his head on Steve's back and he could hear the thumping, loud and clear.

"Don't worry about it," he said. He tried to smile, and it wasn't very hard. "You need it more than I do."

—

Steve carries Bucky's heart well. It beats for the both of them nestled inside the bell of Steve's ribs, carried along well-trodden streets of Brooklyn as it had always been.

And Bucky, even if he's a little colder at night — if he has to tug Steve a little closer to feel the thrum of a heartbeat against his own chest — he can still convince himself that nothing's even changed.

—

"Take it back," Steve says the night Bucky's number comes up. "You gotta take it back, Buck."

Bucky looks at Steve, the red of his heart reflected in the intensity of his eyes, and shakes his head with a careless hand over his sternum. "Naw," he says. "You keep it safe for me, yeah?"

He's got used to seeing his heart cradled in Steve's chest, but never the thrill of it when Steve stands close to him, so close that he can nearly feel the vibrations in his own body. Well, Steve draws near now, and he looks up at Bucky. "Promise, then," Steve says, fierce, with his heart's beating loud enough that Bucky can hear it. "You can't do anything stupid, because you gotta come take it back."

"Hey," Bucky says, and puts a hand on Steve's shoulder. "Nothing's gonna happen."

Maybe the heart's grown bigger, because the light of it is redder and darker than Bucky remembers. It shines out from between Steve's ribs, and the sight of it's worth the ache in Bucky's chest when he lets go of Steve and turns away.

—

It gets worse. The hollow of his chest hurts, faint but persistent, all through basic, but that's not any different from the rest of him. They give him a rifle and tell him to shoot; he looks through the crosshairs, breathes out and he is still, so perfectly still as he pulls on the trigger.

They clap him on the back and make him a sergeant. They don't ask about his heart.

—

Europe is one long ache. It never stops being cold and he spends nights in his bedroll feeling like his breastbone is bruised right through.

He imagines every kill is one step closer to home. He curls himself into the tops of trees, the scope pressing into his brow, and his hands don't shake. He only lets himself inhale when he sees the enemy go down.

When he closes his eyes, there's the glow of red behind his eyelids.

—

When they capture him, they want to know where his heart is.

"None of your business," he spits at them when they're strapping him onto a bench and prodding him with needles. He says it again and again, even when everything in him hurts, when his vision blurs and all he can see are the masked faces over him.

"Safe," he tells them once, through a haze of pain; he thinks about Steve back in Brooklyn, the steady red beat of his heart inside Steve's chest, and somehow manages a faltering smile.

Then there's a small round man staring at him. He says, "Yes, you'll do just fine," with a strange little smile and touches the curve of Bucky's jaw.

Bucky shivers, and once he starts he cannot stop.

—

He gasps out name-rank-serial number into the cold and gray, but it doesn't stop them. He tries to curl in toward himself, around the hollow echo of his heart, but the straps yank at his shoulders and it feels as if they're slicing into the very core of him, toward something still coloring his vision with faint, phantom beats.

It is cold, so cold that Bucky is beginning to lose all feeling. He wonders if this is how he'll go, falling into pieces around the pain at his center.

—

"Bucky," a voice says, with a warm touch to his shoulder, and it can't be Steve, because Steve is small and breakable and _safe_, half a world away — but it's Steve's steady voice that says, "Yeah, it's me," and at his chest there's bright red pulsing back at him, like a promise, but new.

"Steve," he manages, "what—"

And Steve is laying a frantic hand on his chest, the light of the heart gleaming out from between his fingers — "Take it, take it, Buck, you have to—"

Bucky swallows down a pained groan to reach out and trap Steve's hand against his chest. "You can't," he says. Steve's skin is hot against his and the beat of the heart is thumping faintly against his palm. "Don't you see," he pleads, because he knows the way the shadows of Steve's ribs lie comfortably on his skin, the way the heart beats steadier in Steve's chest than it ever did in his own, "it's just as much yours as it is mine, now."

Steve looks at him, makes a rasping sound in his throat and lets his head fall until his forehead is resting, very gently, on Bucky's chest; Bucky winds his fingers through Steve's hair, and that's enough, for the moment, to let him breath without the ache beneath his lungs.

—

"Not without you," Bucky had said, and it was almost a surprise, that he even needed to say it, because didn't Steve _understand_—

—

Peggy Carter's heart is a brilliant red and shines even brighter when she's looking at Steve. Steve looks at her back like she's the sun; he drinks in the light of her and it makes him stand even straighter, taller, his hands suddenly clumsy and his mouth soft like Bucky's only seen in his sleep.

Bucky downs one drink, and another. He almost misses the biting cold of the field, the light in Steve's chest muted to a dull glow underneath his uniform, and the sharp focus he can send down a scope instead of...this, sitting here acutely aware of Steve while Steve's not looking at him at all.

—

"You ready to follow Captain America?" Steve asks. Bucky just manages not to rub at his chest and thinks almost despairingly, _Don't you see, I've been doing that all along._

—

The night of the commandos' first mission, and Bucky lets it the cold of the air wash over him, sharpen his senses to the highest pitch. It's about time for him to take watch, so he slides out of his bedroll to go find Steve.

Steve's leaned up against a tree, something tall and proud and ancient; Bucky can make out a coppery glow around him. He stops where he is to just look for a moment, at Steve and the way the underside of his jaw is lit up, faintly, and wonders what it'd be like for him to touch.

Instead, he thrusts his hands inside the pocket of his fatigues and walks up until Steve twists around to see him coming. "Thought your uniform was supposed to cover that up," he says, nodding down. "No good if HYDRA can see us coming, is it?"

Steve lets out a short laugh. "Yeah, they said it would," he says, briefly pressing his fingers to the reinforced patch at his chest. "I think it's brighter than they thought."

_Yes_, Bucky thinks, as Steve touches his shoulder and heads off. _Because it's you, Steve_.

* * *

The rail wrenches off the side of the train, and Steve can do nothing but watch Bucky fall. It feels like something is wrapped around the heart in his chest, squeezing it tighter and tighter, as if trying to crush it to nothingness, and Steve gasps — buries his face in his forearm and braces for the last of Bucky to be taken from him.

Except then the heart gives a great leap and begins to drum against his ribs again, and Steve's left blinking into the snow, wondering if, maybe—

—

No one can tell him why Bucky's heart's still red and wild in his chest. Peggy finds him in a bombed-out bar with a bottle he can't drown himself in.

"It was Barnes's last gift to you," she tells him sharply, but her hands are gentle when she takes the glass from his hand. "Don't you dare waste it."

—

It's easier for Steve to not think about it when he's moving — in action, when there are HYDRA agents in front of him and all he has to do is fight. But when it's night and he's alone in his head, Bucky's heart beating out a steady rhythm is sometimes too heavy to bear.

It's not that Steve's unused to death. This is a war; Steve's lost men, crouched over bodies torn apart and let grief bow his head. But Steve bites his lip and raises a hand block out the deep red glow of it, because there's something profoundly unfair about having a living reminder of Bucky burrowed deep in his chest.

Sometimes Steve thinks — he lets his hand sink wrist-deep into his chest, wraps his hand around the slickness of the heart and thinks about lifting it out. It trembles and turns sluggish under his grasp, and he swallows down curses at Bucky for ever having given the heart to him at all, for making him live long enough to feel this way.

But he can never manage to quite lift the heart out of his chest. He still remembers frighteningly clear the way Bucky had looked, frantic and so afraid as he pressed the heart into Steve's body, and he lets his head drop and lets his fingers uncurl — lets Bucky's heart keep him going, beat by beat.

—

Schmidt doesn't have a heart. "It's a liability, Captain," he tells Steve. "A weakness that we have both outgrown."

For one fleeting moment, Steve wants that to be true — he wants to be able to breathe without Bucky's heart feeling too large for his chest, wants to stop hearing the echo of Bucky in his ears late at night.

But he remembers the moments when Bucky had thought Steve wasn't looking, pressing a hand over his chest with a wince, and the hardness in Peggy's voice, telling him _don't you dare_; and maybe Schmidt's outgrown humanity but Steve never could.

"You're not my future," Steve spits at him, before Schmidt and the Tesseract disappear in a flash of bright blue.

He steers the plane down into the ocean. the sun flashes brightly off the masses of ice, but he's looking down, at the blue creeping up his fingers and the dull pulses of red at his chest, getting slower and slower—

* * *

When they revive Captain America, his heart is the first thing thing to come alive — pale pink at first, slowly reddening as it fills with blood and beating on as if the last seventy years hadn't happened at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Rating**: T  
**Warnings**: er, some light, entirely consensual vore? also canon-typical violence.  
**Spoilers**: loosely for CA:TWS.  
**Wordcount**: 2328

* * *

A lot of things have changed. Brooklyn now isn't the Brooklyn Steve grew up in anymore: shops closed and people grown up, whole buildings knocked down and gone. When he walks down the street he feels all off-balance, like he's chasing some familiar sight hidden just around the corner.

New York's grown bigger, Steve thinks, taller and girded with steel; and paradoxically, he feels like he can't breathe in it. He misses the small apartment of his memory, just large enough for one bed, and the way he and Bucky would crawl under the covers during winter nights, Bucky's cold feet tucked against Steve's calves and Bucky's heart a comforting beat against his back.

But it's the twenty-first century now and Bucky's heart's in the wrong body, and they're both out of time, out of place; Steve looks around at the cracks where his memories meet reality and he wonders if Brooklyn's outgrown him, or if he's outgrown the city.

—

SHIELD needs him in D.C., and he goes.

Riding into a new city is like breaking out of a fever. He looks up at a low, low skyline, the sky a cheerful blue, and lets the muscles of his shoulders relax. There are no ghosts in the corner of his vision to rattle the heart — it fits under his ribs comfortably, fist-sized and copper-red.

—

Steve's only seen Natasha's heart in flashes, hot urgent gleams in the midst of battle. In return, Natasha sometimes looks at the lit-up mess inside his chest in the quiet moments, head cocked curiously.

"What," Steve says.

Natasha's never been one for playing coy when caught looking. "Sometimes I think your heart's too big for you, Rogers," she says with half a smile on her lips, looking at him like he's something surprising.

Steve thinks about Bucky, the solid weight of him and the breadth of his shoulders. The memories come thick and crowding, until Steve thinks he can nearly feel a presence at his side, an arm draped carelessly across the back of Steve's neck.

"You have no idea," Steve tries to grin. The heart thrums beneath his sternum, too hot and too bright.

—

He gets back to Brooklyn and it is properly summer, great masses of heat pouring onto the city. On the hottest nights he lies in bed with his shirt stripped off and watches the way the heart lights up the edges of his tags, the metal warm from his skin.

He thinks it's growing, Bucky's heart — something about the air of Brooklyn makes it beat faster and harder, almost fiercely red, not quite content to lie within his ribs. It feels like the rest of him: restless when he should be still, uncomfortable in a setting that's just a little too wrong.

It's hard for him to sleep. The heat blankets his body and he dips into unconsciousness for just brief moments before he's waking up, shivering like it's still 1944. But there's sweat trickling down his neck and the heart's very, very hot; he doesn't know if he's freezing or burning up but it's going to consume him, one way or the other.

—

The day he packs up and points his bike south to D.C., the heart beats on, aching a little but very steady, and that's going to have to be good enough.

—

"That's not your heart, is it?" Sam asks, and Steve comes to a stop.

Sam's heart is a good heart. It's flushed and quivering after their run, but it beats honestly as Sam looks at him, a solemn tilt to his mouth.

"Who—"

"My wingman," Sam says, quiet and with a twitch of his hands. "Riley. Gave it to me before I could stop him. Saved my life, he did."

There's a fondness to Sam's voice that makes Steve's heartbeat falter for a moment, reminded of late nights on Brooklyn fire escapes, of he and Bucky patching each other up with bloodied hands.

"What happened to him?" Steve asks carefully.

Sam looks down. "RPG got to him. Fell out of the sky from right next to me — and I couldn't do a thing."

Steve doesn't say "I'm sorry," because that doesn't, _can't_ cover the enormity of it — the crushing pain of it when Bucky had fallen and Steve had wanted, desperately, for it to take away his breath too; the wrong-rightness of it as it settled back into rhythm, even redder than before.

But Sam looks at Steve with understanding eyes and mutters, "Dumb punk," and it startles Steve out of his memories and a laugh out of his throat.

"Yeah," Steve says back. He thinks about the feeling of Bucky's hands firm around his ribcage, and he smiles.

—

Fury comes to Steve's apartment, battered, and then bullets start shattering the windows.

"Tell them I'm in pursuit," Steve tells Agent Thirteen, and runs — he runs through the offices that line the building, crashes through doors and rolls through a window to land on his feet on a wind-chilled rooftop, and his heart ought to be racing but it's very still in his chest, like nothing's happened, like Nick Fury's not bleeding out somewhere behind him—

He whips his shield forward, and the man puts out his arm and catches it, metal ringing on metal.

Steve stares at him over the shield between them. The man's eyes are very dark above his mask and he looks back at Steve before throwing the shield back with a hard flick of his wrist. Steve puts his hands out, cradles it in both hands, and it feels so easy, natural — like they've been doing this all their lives, sharing the shield back and forth (sharing _something_).

It takes Steve a moment to raise his head, and the man's already gone. Steve looks over the edge of the building, the shield a familiar weight on his arm, and his heart's beating steady, red, red, red.

—

"The Winter Soldier," Natasha says. Steve holds the name on his tongue, swallows away the feeling that it's not quite right.

—

The Winter Soldier comes for him.

The Winter Soldier's hand is cold when it closes around Steve's throat, bruising. Steve chokes, kicks out with both feet, but his vision's gone gray around the edges by the time he lands a solid hit.

He drops to the ground, wheezing because his lungs are refusing to expand. It feels like his heart's trying to grow into all the available spaces in his chest, blindingly red and hot enough to make him gasp.

The Winter Soldier's coming towards him; Steve lunges forward to tackles his legs, and the man goes down, twisting heavily to land halfway on his side. His head hits the ground and there's an audible crackle of plastic.

When Steve reaches up to pin the man's wrists down, an all-too familiar face is staring back at him.

"Bucky?" Steve breathes, even as he's scrambling backwards.

The man's face doesn't change and his teeth are bared in a snarl when he springs, knocking Steve down hard. In a moment his knees are digging into Steve's stomach and there's a knife in his hand, but it's _Bucky_ all the same — Steve knows the lines of Bucky's face, and the borrowed heart he's carried for so long is humming joyfully, making his whole body thrill.

"Bucky," he says again, even as the knife presses into his throat, and slides his scraped and bleeding hands into his chest.

It's easier than he'd thought to pry the heart out from underneath his ribs. It quivers very fast against his palms, and he says, "Take it, Bucky, it's yours," as he lifts it up — ignores the warm nick at his throat and _pushes_, hard, past Bucky's tac vest and layers of clothing and into the welcoming hollow of Bucky's chest.

Bucky's face contorts, and a small confused noise makes its way out of his throat. STRIKE team members are descending upon them now, pressing the muzzle of a gun to the back of Steve's head, but all of Steve's attention is focused on Bucky: the way he presses a tentative hand to his chest, the way he staggers, slowly, his feet.

"What did you do to me," Bucky shouts at him as the van doors slide closed. Steve focuses on the cracked and raspy sound of Bucky's voice so he won't have to think about the ache that's rooted in his chest.

* * *

The man had put something in him. It sits in his body like it has a right to, much too heavy; he has to relearn how to shift his weight as he moves, how to draw a breath when it feels like he's drowning in heat.

When he reports in, Pierce turns to look at the techs.

"We don't know how he got it," one of them says, hands thrown up. "He came in like that."

Pierce shrugs and turns back. "Well, get rid of it," he says.

They strap him down. He tries not to move but he can't help his breaths coming fast, the rapid rise and fall of his chest. The thing leaps erratically under his skin, very red and very bright.

It won't go.

They try with latex-gloved hands, and then with sharp gleaming scalpels that sink easily through the skin and muscle of his chest — and it hurts and it bleeds but it _stays_.

Pierce watches the whole thing and frowns. "Wipe him, then," he sighs when the techs shake their heads. "Make him forget about it."

—

There's heat prickling at his skin and he doesn't know why. His vision is red-tinged at the corners.

—

He's been feeling wrong since this mission started. He feels wrong now, when the man looks at him and says, "Please don't make me do this," and something in his chest lurches at the desperation in that voice.

He shakes it off, because he's not allowed to be wrong. The man holds a shield that he uses as a weapon, and he looks at it, brings his pistol up squarely at the man's chest and aims for his—

He aims for the—

He pulls the trigger but the bullets crash into the shield. The man rushes at him, aiming for his wrist. The pistol clatters to the floor, then off the platform altogether.

"Bucky," the man says. There's a weight behind his sternum, a very hot and aching point, and it distracts him long enough that he fails to dodge the man's next attack.

He goes down, and the man's on him, falling heavily on his legs and going for his wrists. He says, forcefully, "You know me," and the words go through him like they're true, like they're reminding him of something he already knows—

Everything is faintly red: not red like blood but something brighter, truer. He blinks and breathes and shouts, "Stop it," even as he's rolling them over, fist drawn back and clenched tight.

The man doesn't flinch — doesn't do anything except smile, a little pained but real. He says, unsteadily, "Sorry, Buck," and his head tips back and his throat is bared.

He looks at the man: at his eyes closing softly and at the expanse of skin where a pulse should be leaping, but isn't. He looks at him and his chest feels very tight and very full, something drumming loudly against his ribs.

The helicarrier jerks with a sudden screech. He loses his grip on the man and the man falls, off the platform and out of reach, through the cracked and ruined shell of the carrier and down, down, down—

—

The water is dark and blue, and very cold. His eyes close at the shock of it before he forces them open; there's a gleam of light coming from his chest, cutting through the murky dimness, and somehow that's not surprising at all.

The man is sinking, slowly, his arms outstretched. He kicks his way toward him, suddenly afraid.

In the back of his mind, he thinks, _Steve_.

—

He heaves Steve out of the water. The wind is rising — it ruffles wet strands of Steve's hair and raises a chill across his skin. He watches Steve cough up water, anxious — watches him rise up to his elbows and collapse with a wince again.

"Steve," he says, and his heart—

His heart is in his chest, radiating warmth and full of life, while Steve's chest is empty and that's wrong, it's _wrong_—

So he presses his hand into his chest, and the heart stills in his grasp, obedient. It's quite easy, like he's done this before — like it's something he was always meant to do. He touches Steve's face and looks at the heart, very heavy and quivering in his grasp, and he—

"Don't," Steve mumbles. "You said you'd take it back. After."

He doesn't remember that. He doesn't remember much of anything, but he remembers this: Steve Rogers is good, and stubborn, and loving, and he should not be without a heart.

"You need it," he insists, and presses the heart into Steve's cold fingers.

Steve struggles up. They're holding the heart between them, their hands touching. Steve looks at him over the heart, red and very, very alive, and Steve says, "We'll share, then."

A thrill goes through him when Steve presses his mouth to his heart and bites cleanly into it. Steve's mouth is red when he looks up, and then he leans forward to press their lips together, sliding the piece into his mouth. It settles comfortably in his chest, a kernel of warmth.

So they sit on the muddy bank of the Potomac, sharing slick careful bites as the warmth spreads in their limbs, and the space between their ribs are very red, bright and clear.

"Bucky," Steve says, pulling him into his arms; their hearts are pressed so close together that they beat as one, and Bucky tastes the wetness of Steve's mouth, says, low and steady, "Yes."


End file.
